Poem Analysis: Stone Soup

The theme in both the poem and the passage is to not be selfish. Both contain similar events that follow this theme in a slightly different way.

In the passage Nail Soup the woman first showed her selfishness when she said, “...but you may as well get away from here at once.......my place is not an inn.” The author described her as greedy in the sentence, “...You must not be so cross and hard-heated…” The main character is a traveler and he is tired and poor, and just wanted a place to stay for the night and some food. The lady made it clear that she didn’t want to help him. In line 3 and 4 of the poem “Stone Soup” it states, “Door to door looking for food, all they got was firewood.” In this poem soldiers “battered and torn…...hungry and worn.” wanted food, and the villagers selfishly gave them only wood for the fire. We know the

villagers were selfish because of line 22, “....and greed a distant blindness.”

However throughout both the passage and the poem the characters begin to share different things to create a special soup.

(In the poem it was stone soup, and in the passage it was nail soup.) In Nail Soup, as the man started his “soup” the woman began with bringing flour to thicken the soup as stated in the text, “Well, I think I have a scrap of flour somewhere.” Before this, she told him that she didn’t even have a morsel for herself. Then she brought potatoes, beef, carrots, milk, herbs, barley and other things. “And then she remembered she had a little barley, and as for milk, well, she wasn’t quite out of that, she said, for her best cow had just calved. And then she went to fetch both the one and the other. In the poem “Stone Soup” the townspeople began to bring the things needed to stone soup. In lines 14-16 it states, “A lady shouted what no meat? Here have some that can’t be beat! Carrots, onions would all repeat…..” and “A fella said, “Would be better with herb….” This shows that the people had stuff and they were beginning to share these ingreadients for soup hesitantly at first, but more and more

eagerly.

In fact in the story Nail Soup the woman not only provided for the soup, but for other stuff as well. “She went straight to a cupboard and brought out the tea, butter and cheese, and smoked beef and veal……..” but she also gave him breakfast and the bed to sleep in, as well as money. Unknowingly in both the poem and passage the people overcame their selfishness and learned how to share.